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Category Archives: media
Comparing trauma release and shaking medicine videos
Having just done the exercises along with the Trauma Releasing Exercises DVD for the first time, I recommend using the video over using the book to get up to speed on these.
The extra exercises at the beginning are nice, and they are more pleasant to do with the models on the video. They make it seem easier and get to the shaking part more quickly.
Read the book, The Revolutionary Trauma Release Process, for background and detail.
Get both!
I know some of you are probably confused about these two techniques, trauma releasing and shaking medicine. They are different yet related.
The trauma releasing exercises are specifically designed to strain the feet and leg muscles so that they begin to quiver and tremble and shake and release the deeply held tension from trauma and prolonged stress.
Every body does this a little differently, but basically, you lie on your back on the floor and let your legs tremble. The trembling may move into your pelvis, spine, neck, hands, arms, and shoulders, as well. The whole process is done lying down.
A room full of people may be doing these exercises, but each is in his/her own space, not touching.
Deep emotions may arise during this process.
Here’s a video of people trembling after doing the trauma releasing exercises.
Shaking medicine, as far as I know, is a term coined by Dr. Bradford Keeney, who also wrote a book called Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement (which I’m currently reading but bought used without the 40-minute CD of ecstatic drumming it came with).
I see he has written another book, Shaking Out the Spirits, and released a 6-CD audio set from Sounds True, Shaking: The Original Path to Ecstasy and Healing.
Shaking medicine is practiced in cultural traditions around the world, including the Kalahari Bushmen, Quakers, Shakers, and holy rollers. Shakers may stand, sit, and lie on ground, and move from one to the other “as the spirit moves them.” It also may be accompanied by vocalizations such as shouting and singing.
This kind of shaking is a way to heal and connect with God and let spirit move you. Literally.
It too may be accompanied by deep emotional release.
Here’s a video of Bradford Keeney shaking with some Kalahari Bushmen. It’s pretty long but you can certainly get a sense that this kind of shaking is different. It’s part of a community ritual with singing, drumming, and clapping.
It’s also practiced by individual shamans healing people with their shaking touch, sometimes passing the shaking on to another person.
In my current view, trauma releasing is a form of shaking medicine. Both practices release energy blockages and enhance the flow of chi in the body. Literally, both use shaking to heal, thus they are shaking medicine.
The term shaking medicine sounds pretty woo-woo and far out. The term trauma releasing exercises sounds much less threatening of the dominant paradigm and has a “legitimate” purpose that you could probably get a grant for researching.
The biggest difference I see is that shaking medicine is also an ecstatic practice. That word, ecstasy, isn’t associated with trauma release.
I haven’t had an opportunity to do shaking medicine yet (or have I? I practiced ecstatic dance for a dozen years…)
Both TRE and shaking medicine are kin to rebirthing and holotropic breathwork, which use breath to release deeply held tension and emotion.
I have a hunch that with all of these practices, when you’re done, you feel full of life and clean and fresh, very present, unstoried, and renewed. When you feel stale, you do it again.
I’ll keep reading and report on the book when I’m done, or when I find something too good to keep to myself.
Meanwhile, I’m looking for someone to do holotropic breathwork with me.
Repost from NY Times: Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?
A new field in health research is called “inactivity studies,” and this article reports on its findings.
Here’s one. Two people eat and exercise the same. One gains weight, the other doesn’t. Why?
If you fidget more and move more, but not necessarily work out, you can burn a lot of calories. People who are more sedentary put on more weight.
That seems like a no-brainer, but so much knowledge about this is based on self-reporting, which is simply unreliable. The study used “magic underwear” to track motion.
This is your body on chairs: Electrical activity in the muscles drops — “the muscles go as silent as those of a dead horse,” Hamilton says — leading to a cascade of harmful metabolic effects. Your calorie-burning rate immediately plunges to about one per minute, a third of what it would be if you got up and walked. Insulin effectiveness drops within a single day, and the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes rises. So does the risk of being obese. The enzymes responsible for breaking down lipids and triglycerides — for “vacuuming up fat out of the bloodstream,” as Hamilton puts it — plunge, which in turn causes the levels of good (HDL) cholesterol to fall.
I’m curious. How much sitting is too much? More than six hours a day, some say; others say more than nine hours a day. Sitting is more lethal than age, sex, education, smoking, hypertension, BMI and other indicators.
And did you know that Steelcase, maker of file cabinets and office furniture, now makes treadmill desks?
That’s the ticket for health at sedentary jobs. That, or fidget and get up and walk around a lot.
“Go into cubeland in a tightly controlled corporate environment and you immediately sense that there is a malaise about being tied behind a computer screen seated all day,” he said. “The soul of the nation is sapped, and now it’s time for the soul of the nation to rise.”
Behind the scenes of a blog: search terms that have brought readers here :-)
Behind the scenes of this WordPress.com blog, I can view my site’s statistics. One of my favorite things to check on is the list of search terms that people have entered into a search engine that somehow got them to this blog.
Besides the usual suspects like yoga, 4 hour body, trauma releasing exercises, buddha brain, spartan carousel, flu, and tibetan monks austin, here are some others over the past three months that have been amusing:
having a good axle-hole (?)
zafu brown (any relationship to Encyclopedia Brown?)
mcrae says dukkha means (okay, William, what’s up with that?)
yoaching yoga coaching
dont fall asleep in trauma (okay, i wont)
4 hour body can you eat refried beans everyday (love it!)
realigious ked wearing people (it’s a cult!)
There are some that are inspiring. I plan to do my own Google searches using these search terms. Some people know what’s important!
synesthesia and gamma waves (I’ll have what she’s having)
playful joy
shaking medicine groups
Repost from Elephant Journal: Drink Beer, Eat Chocolate, Live to 100
Drink Beer, Eat Chocolate, Live to 100. ~ Jolee McBreen | elephant journal.
Click to read what researchers now believe the link between longevity and stress is.
Hint: It’s not avoiding stress or minimizing stress.
Thanks, Elephant Journal.
Trauma releasing exercises: the video
I ordered the Trauma Releasing Exercises DVD a few weeks ago and finally found time to watch it.
I recommend it if you are a visual learner and if you want to get up to speed and do the TRE exercises quickly without reading a book or having to find and pay a teacher. You can watch it, learn a bit of the background without too much detail, watch people shaking, and do the exercises in real time along with the demonstration.
One of the beautiful gifts of learning from the DVD is that you can watch and do the exercises with another person and pause when you need to, rewind, fast forward, etc.
One important note: If you have only read the book, the exercises presented here are slightly different. There are some exercises for the feet at the beginning, and more details are provided.
I was just watching the models do Exercise 5 in the book, and David Berceli’s voice-over adds that you can allow your jaw to open as you twist your upper body. I didn’t see that in the book.
The exercises also have different timing, so that where the book says to hold for one minute, the video says to hold for 30 seconds to one minute.
The video also includes testimonials from various professionals — two chiropractors, a marriage and family therapist, a writer/teacher about the psoas and the core, a clinical social worker specializing in trauma, a massage therapist/teacher, and a physical therapist/cranio-sacral therapist.
Thank you, readers
At the end of January, this blog had gotten 5,000 views.
Today the count is up to 7,355 views. I also have several new subscribers. Welcome! I hope you find some value here.
Just want to say thanks to all of you. I appreciate you reading my posts and especially enjoy getting your comments.
This blog is an outlet for me to follow and pursue what interests me and share what I discover, both in myself and “out there” in the world. I imagine that not every post is everyone’s cup of tea, but to those who read my posts occasionally, or regularly, I really want you to know how grateful I am to have something to offer. And I’m glad you can pass up the ones that don’t resonate, too!
I feel like I’m on a journey, and I don’t know the destination yet, but getting there is a lot of fun. Thanks for being company on the road.
Samadhi and the right brain
I’m linking to an article published in Elephant Journal that has an interesting discussion about the right brain and mystical states. Jill Bolte Taylor wrote about having her left brain shut down during a cerebral hemorrhage in My Stroke of Insight.
This writer, a yogi and ayurvedist, wonders aloud if samadhi is actually experienced through shutting down big parts of the left brain.
Read on for a worthwhile discussion, and juicy tidbits about a few spiritual eminences.
New book, Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement
I found a book, Shaking Medicine: The Healing Power of Ecstatic Movement by Bradford Keeney, at Half Price Books on Sunday when I was looking for another book. Of course it jumped off the shelf and right into my hands!
The author is a professor at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, or at least he was in 2007 when this book was published, and has made a remarkable connection with the bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, who practice shaking medicine ritually. Dr. Keeney has been shaking his whole adult life and has the gift of being able to induce shaking in others.
Plus, he seems to have training in anthropology, systems theory, and hypnosis, so I have a connection there with my NLP training.
Here’s a link to his website. Oh, and he and a colleague (operating as The Mojo Doctors) now offer 5-day experiences they call Rehab for the Soul in New Orleans.
I do like the term shaking medicine better than trauma releasing exercises. And please note that it is about shaking, not dance, although apparently ecstatic dance can unleash ecstatic shaking.
It also seems that the trauma releasing exercises are the latest incarnation of a practice that goes way back in time. It has surfaced in various cultures, religions, and places over millenia. It may be the opposite of meditation: instead of deep stillness, it’s deep uncontrolled movement.
Whatever. It’s good medicine.
I’ll write more as I’ve read more. Just wanted to let y’all know where this path is now taking me…
10 rules for brilliant women
In my online wanderings, I came across this woman’s blog. I like it! It’s called Wise Living Blog. The blogger, Tara Sophia Mohr, is a coach.
Notice how nice it feels to be addressed as brilliant!
In this post, dated September 17, 2010, she writes about 10 rules for brilliant women.
Here’s the first rule:
1. Make a pact. No one else is going to build the life you want for you. No one else will even be able to completely understand it. The most amazing souls will show up to cheer you on along the way, but this is your game. Make a pact to be in it with yourself for the long haul, as your own supportive friend at every step along the way.
Here’s number 3:
3. Gasp. Start doing things that make you gasp and get the adrenalin flowing. Ask yourself, “What’s the gasp-level action here?” Your fears and a tough inner critic will chatter in your head. That’s normal, and just fine. When you hear that repetitive, irrational, mean inner critic, name it for what it is, and remember, it’s just a fearful liar, trying to protect you from any real or seeming risks. Go for the gasps and learn how false your inner critic’s narrative really is, and how conquerable your fears.
I love this one!
6. Question the voice that says “I’m not ready yet.” I know, I know. Because you are so brilliant and have such high standards, you see every way that you could be more qualified. You notice every part of your idea that is not perfected yet. While you are waiting to be ready, gathering more experience, sitting on your ideas, our friends referenced in rule five [the arrogant idiots] are being anointed industry visionaries, getting raises, and seeing heir ideas come to life in the world. They are no more ready than you, and perhaps less. Jump in the sandbox now, and start playing full out. Find out just how ready you are.
The rest of the rules are pretty inspiring. Click this link to read them.
The Well: bodymindheartspirit 